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More and more people are accessing the Web on Mobile phones. According to Google, mobile search engine usage has surpassed the amount of desktop search engine usage. If organic traffic is important for you, you really want a Mobile SEO Company that provides best of the class Mobile SEO Services.

Responsive Design SEO

Google wants to make sure that its search engine users are served the most relevant results with a good user experience. At a fundamental level Mobile SEO Services shift gears from pure SEO elements like Back-links, Content, etc. towards more technical aspects of your website, especially related to User Experience on mobile devices.

Google recommends Responsive web design methodology for building mobile friendly sites. From SEO perspective the biggest plus point of using responsive design is that responsive sites do not create additional URLs or deliver different HTML to its users.

This makes SEO for Responsive design a little less complicated, thus reducing the possibility of errors. Further the design itself increases efficiency by saving unnecessary redirects.

But I want to clarify, Relevance, Authority and User Experience are some of the essential factors that play a key role in determining rankings in Google Organic Search. Thus from a ranking perspective Google does not favor any specific technique for building mobile sites.

Evolution of Responsive Design

The need for device friendly websites was felt many years ago. Accordingly W3C in its CSS3 Working Draft proposal of 23 May 2001, introduced the idea of Media Queries (explained in detail later in this post) as an efficient solution for offering specific CSS rules, depending on browser size and device screen size.

But what led to the birth of Responsive Design? The spark was reignited by Ethan Marcotte’s article in A List Apart, written in May 2010. The article was titled "Responsive Web Design".

Responsive design requires collective efforts of the visual designer and the developer. While the visual designer ensures that the website front end looks amazing on all screen devices, the developer uses CSS Media queries to make the design scalable for various browsers, mobiles, tablets and desktop. It is the collaborative efforts that make Responsive design really unique and highly useful.

Basic elements of Responsive Design

Responsive design is future friendly, fast and enhances web user experience. It has transformed the standard pixel widths and font sizes to a more fluid layout, which easily adapts to variations in screen size technologies. While converting desktop sites to mobile sites, a first step towards responsive layout is to start thinking about which elements should stay, which can be refactored and which ones need to go to save space in the mobile environment.

Breakpoints in Responsive Design

In a responsive site, Breakpoints are the points at which a new Media Query is applied and thus new CSS rules are served. Think of them as the boundaries which are used to define different screen or view port sizes.

Designers can use standard breakpoints built specifically for mobiles, tablets and desktop variations or identify breakpoints using a progressive enhancement approach. A good rule of thumb is to insert breakpoints whenever the site breaks or the layout starts to fall apart.

Media Queries in Responsive Design

A media query is the most important element of Responsive design. Any device accessing a server sends some basic information about the browser agent, the resolution of the device and the size of the window viewing the page.

A media query is a CSS rule that limits the scope of a style, based on factors defined by the Media query, such as screen resolution, orientation or color index. A media query specifies a Media type or a Set of expressions which are checked by the browser. Examples of media types are screen for digital screens, print for printed pages and all for all media types. Examples of media expressions are min-width or a specific orientation.

Before delving into Responsive Design one really needs to understand the concept of Media Queries very well. Here are some examples to help you have a better understanding of Media Queries.

To apply a set of CSS rules based on the device width or viewport width, which is the width of the browser window, you will have to use Media Expressions. Parameters defined by the expression will be checked by the browser to make the CSS rules apply to that specific breakpoint.

Here are some examples for using Media Queries on expressions.

To apply CSS based on a viewport with a width of 500 pixels or less, use below media query:
@media (max-width: 500px) { CSS }

Alternatively, if you needed to target only devices whose width is 500 pixels or less, you could change your expression to something like this:
@media (max-device-width: 500px) { CSS }

Use min-width expression to apply CSS to everything over the viewport width specified.

To apply CSS rules for screens that are equal to or exceeds 600 px use below Media Query:
@media only screen and (min-width: 600px) { CSS }